Hollinger Corp. 
P H8.5 



Series 13 



November, 1919 — January, 1920 Nos. 1 and 2 



Meredith College 



Quarterly Bulletin 

1919-1920 
SPECIAL EDUCATION NUMBER 




Published by Meredith College in November, January, March and May 



Entered as second-class matter, January 13, 1908, at the post-office at Raleigh, N. C, 
under the act of Congress of July 16, 1894 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 

Reprints of: 

A New Menace to Education 3 

John Jay Chapman 

The New Nationalism and Education (Extracts) 7 

Robert W. Bruere 
The Colleges and the Nation (Extracts) 11 

Arthur Twining Hadley 

The Classics and the "Practical" Argument 14 

Frank M. Colby 

What to Do for Greek 18 

Paul Shorey 
Does Education Mean Happiness? 30 

(From The Living Age) 

Note on Contents 

The articles reprinted in this pamphlet represent a few 1919 
protests against "the so-called practical spirit of the age." For 
though Yale seems to be making the road to learning a little broader 
than Mr. Chapman, and Mr. Bruere's working men approve, Presi- 
dent Hadley in The Colleges and the Nation at least throws a sop 
to Cerberus. And the liberal culture educational programs of work- 
ing men's associations presented by Mr. Bruere ought, to some 
extent, console lovers of "the things that are more excellent" for 
the apparently "growing contempt for culture and the classics in 
American universities." And though Mr. Colby is in this instance 
chiefly concerned in pointing out the illogical reasoning of those 
classicists who "rest their case on what is called the argument from 
practical life," he illustrates most convincingly the power of "the 
classical tradition." In fact all of these articles, taken as a whole, 
encourage the advocate of "the humanities" to believe with Pro- 
fessor Shorey that "the unsettlement of all spiritual values by the 
Great War" is really only temporary. 

E. A. Colton. 



GIFT 
THE CQLLRflfa 

1UN S »2Q 



<i 



A New Menace to Education 1 

The Growing Contempt for Culture and the Classics in American Universities 

John Jay Chapman 

Well, Yale has followed her sisters and dropped Latin from 
her entrance exams. 2 You can get stamped as an educated Yale 
man without knowing bonus bona bonum. 

And how much Latin did the American colleges ever teach? 
Any boy with good teaching could learn enough Latin in six 
months to get into an American college. And just this amount, 
this little smattering of Latin, is enough to make the whole 
difference in any man's outlook upon civilization. This bonus 
bona bonum makes French and Spanish and Italian easy to 
him. It puts him at home in half the words of the English 
language. It acclimates him in literature, in European travel, 
in South America. Almost everything an educated man has 
to do with is tinged with bonus bona bonum. 

The tincture of Latinity which the Roman Empire left upon 
Europe is to modern cultivation what Christianity is to modern 
religion, — it pervades everything. These two elements — Latin 
and Christianity — taken together, make up the unity of the 
modern world. They form the common inheritance of modern 
Europe, — a sort of deep inter-racial bond, which, so far as 
human reason can see, is the most important thing in the life 
of the western world. 

And now our Universities have decided that the Latin phrase- 
book is too hard for the American brain. It is difficult and 
unnecessary. The real reason that our Universities are throw- 
ing over Latin is that Latin has been badly taught, and it is 
easier to throw Latin over than to bring in good teaching. 
But what a calamitous state for the learned to be in! 

Our learned men are ever dealing with conditions, not with 
ideas. When you say "Latin" to them it means Latin teaching 
as it exists, with all its waste of time and deadly unintelligence. 
Our scholars would encourage the modern languages, would 
they? And so they regard each modern language as a field by 
itself, and withhold that smattering of Latin which is the open 
sesame to most of them. 



1 Copyright Vanity Fair (June, 1919). Reprinted by courtesy of Mr. Chapman 
and the editors of Vanity Fair. 

[ 2 Yale still requires Latin for the degree of Bachelor of Arts. — E. A. C] 



4 Meredith College Bulletin 

This is like throwing away the one ray that illuminates 
modern languages, and gives a man an insight into the heart 
and soul of them. The Latin primer imperceptibly deepens 
the consciousness of any child. This question of the meaning 
of words is the first natural step in philosophy. Children take 
up the study themselves and pursue it upon the smallest en- 
couragement. Give a boy a little Latin and it shines in every 
book he reads. It enters the pores of his mind and relates 
him to the, — to the League of Nations and the destiny of man- 
kind. 

But our learned men have not the leisure to consider these 
things. They are serving the public and competing for the 
good will of the public ; and the public in America has a notion 
that Latin is hard and not useful. Oh, I say, but there must 
be some men in our Universities who are not so great that 
they cannot consider the elements of education. There are 
small men left somewhere, who think about reading and writing 
and the education of children, and verses to be learned and 
stories to be read, of the multiplication table and Hans Ander- 
son and the rudiments. These people must know that to 
mingle amo amas amat with juvenile education puts in the 
youth's hand the end of a thread that connects him with every- 
thing of interest in life. 

But your professional educators cannot be expected to de- 
scend to such baby-talk as this. They see things in the large 
and through schedules. They see a Department of English, 
— Old English, Anglo-Saxon, The Renaissance, Pintruicchio, 
Savonarola, Early Provincial poetry. They invite us to these 
studies with a magnificent sweep of the hand; but the initial 
entrance fee of a penny's worth of Latin, without which none 
of these lordly entertainments can be enjoyed, the Universities 
will not exact. They fear that the public will grudge the 
penny. The public will not understand. Why, what are our 
Universities there for, if it is not to understand these things 
themselves and take the awful risk of imparting them to the 
American public? 

There is a feature of democracy, — and by democracy I mean 
mass-government', — which gives ever too great preponderance 
to the present moment. The mass swings heavily in one direc- 
tion, and then surges back in another. It seems as if a major 
passion of one sort or another were always raging. At one 
time this passion is business, at another, conquest, at another, 



Meredith College Bulletin 5 

religion or prohibition. And the masses are always about to 
do something that is going to be immediately effective, — settle 
the question forever, grow rich forever, conquer the world for- 
ever, reform mankind forever. 

In any democracy the sensible person is sure to be in a hope- 
less minority almost all the time; for if he ever convinces 
the majority as to some desirable line of thought or conduct, 
the people take up the idea and travesty it. They out-do him 
at his own specialty. In this manner the skeptics of the French 
Revolution outdid Yoltaire in skepticism. "A bas Voltaire !" 
they cried. "Voltaire est deiste. Voltaire est bigot !" I sup- 
pose that, to-day, if the masses of America could get an im- 
pression that Latin was a bond between the Bolsheviki and the 
Allies, they would besiege New Haven and Cambridge, carrying 
statutes of Cicero and Virgil on their shoulders, and demanding 
the classics and more of them, with no delay and no compromise. 

We ought, perhaps, to expect that everything in democracies 
must proceed by tidal waves. But it is sad to see the sensible 
people, the learned and the thoughtful, being swayed by the 
illusions of the multitude and losing hold of the deeper and 
quieter realities of life. It is disheartening to see the guardians 
of liberty betray their trust. Tor literature is language, and 
the neglect of Latin means the loss of language. 

If Latin is dropped America will soon have a language of 
her own which will tend to alienate us from Great Britain and 
Europe. In those countries they preserve their languages 
with instructive and sedulous care. They preserve Latin as a 
part of their own language. The educated classes are, at every 
epoch, the people who conserve any language ; the rest adopt it. 
If the educated person in America neglects his Latin, his 
English will soon turn into a hard vernacular, and the old 
English literature will become to him uninteresting. 

We may be sure that in London Shakespeare will be played 
for some hundreds of years to come; but fifty years from now 
Shakespeare will be incomprehensible to the people of Chicago. 
Why is this? Because the writers and journalists and public 
speakers of America will have lost the old idioms of English 
literature, and the public will be familiar with nothing but 
an American volapuk. Our poetry will be a non-resonant 
patois, our mind rigid and ignorant. 

There has never been a literature in the world which did 
not spring from the worship of old forms, and a digging into 



6 Meredith College Bulletin 

the roots of language. It is not merely because Latin is 
dropped that we must grieve, but because the dropping of 
Latin shows that our educators do not know what learning is. 
They do not understand the relation which exists between lan- 
guage and mind. They have inherited the fruits of a whole 
army of American saints who planted our colleges large and 
small, — religious pioneers, for the most part, — but all of them 
students, scholars and prophets of scholarship. It was these 
men who gave the light to democracy. It is they who made us. 
They are the pit out of which we are digged. It is they who 
have united us to Europe and made possible the future union 
of mankind. For it is by our literacy we stand. 

And now the successors of these spiritual Fathers of America 
discard the rudiments of literacy. The next generation of 
American college presidents will not themselves have known 
bonus bona bonum. If you speak to them of Rome they will 
be dumb. Will they continue to hand out degrees written in 
a tongue they cannot themselves read? And how about the 
standing of our scholars in Europe? How about America's 
intellectual future, 

The nature of education cannot be changed by the action of 
any American College Board; and it is certain that if we are 
hereafter to produce good poets, writers, and thinkers, their 
power will be drawn from the same sources that have fed the 
poets, the writers, and the thinkers of the past. It cannot 
be otherwise. 

I have a faith that nature will always produce the scholar. 
ISTot only will the tradition of him be continued in families, 
but — and this is certain — new schools will be started to meet 
the deficiencies of our colleges, and minister to the deeper 
needs of the age, now that the colleges are shutting up shop. 



Meredith College Bulletin 



Extracts from "The New Nationalism and Education" 1 

Robert W. Beueke 
(Bureau, of Industrial Research, Washington, D. C.) 

[Mr. Bruere's article should be read in its entirety; but even these brief extracts 
are most suggestive.] 

The British Workers' Educational Association has issued 
a series of pamphlets in which the specific educational proposals 
of the organized workers are concretely defined. One of these 
pamphlets bears the title What Is Democratic Education? In 
contrast with the usual schemes of "practical" trade and tech- 
nical education by which educational reformers co mm only 
propose to improve the quality of the labor-market, this trench- 
ant document is an impassioned protest against the "utilitarian 
aim which is the curse of our schools. . . . Harrow was 
founded for poor working-class boys. The education provided 
was classical. It was an education which makes not only 
freemen, but leaders of men. The upper class flung themselves 
on this school. Its sons filled Eton, Winchester, Rugby, as 
well as Harrow. ... In Denmark, Grundtrig wanted to 
lift the agricultural population sunk in miserable poverty. 
Did he begin to give instruction in the raising of crops and 
feeding of poultry? On the contrary, he banished the 'useful' 
subjects and gave a humanistic training pure and simple. The 
results have amazed the world. ... To come to our own 
land. Why has our elementary-school system been, in some 
respects, a failure, and our domestic-economy lessons in par- 
ticular an illusion? Because the teaching was based on the 
false assumption that useful information forced on undeveloped 
minds educates. . . . We thought the banquet of life was 
to be spread for all — all, the best that is, the best that will be, 
open for those who can receive it. . . . The really great 
thing is that liberal education should be open to all who can 
profit by it." 

Is it not a noteworthy thing that at the very moment when 
our great university foundations are coming increasingly under 
the sway of business men with a predominantly utilitarian 
conception of education, when specialized technical schools are 
steadily encroaching upon the province of that "idle curiosity" 
— that pursuit of matter-of-fact knowledge for its own sake 
which is the distinguishing characteristic of the university 

1 Copyright Harper and Brothers (July, 1919). Reprinted by courtesy of 
Mr. Bruere and of Harper's Magazine. 



8 Meredith College Bulletin 

proper — the keenest minds in the wage-working gronp should 
be insisting with increasing determination upon a liberal edu- 
cation for every boy and girl, every man and woman, as the 
indispensable qualification for democratic citizenship? Both 
in England and America they are clamoring for the extension 
of the period of compulsory school attendance from the age 
of fourteen to the age of sixteen and then eighteen as a pre- 
liminary to its ultimate extension through the college and 
university. The platform of the Labor Party of Greater 
New York, which fairly illustrates the educational aspirations 
of the most' alert of the labor leaders both of America and 
England, calls for the creation of a national department of 
education whose head shall have cabinet rank; for the demo- 
cratization of education government in the grade schools, 
colleges, universities, and libraries through the participation 
of labor and the organized teachers and librarians in the deter- 
mination of new methods, policies, and programs; and the 
extension of the principle of free public instruction to colleges 
and universities. Just as the medical and legal professions have 
come to require a liberal unspecialized training of college 
grade as a prerequisite to professional specialization, so the 
organized wage-workers are demanding high school and college 
training in the liberal arts and sciences that "quicken the 
mental life" as a prerequisite to craft specialization. 

The execution of such a program would, of course, involve 
an enormously increased expenditure upon public education. 
But these wage-workers insist that no other expenditure could 
promise a comparable return to a democratic community. They 
see the consequences of an undemocratic educational policy in 
Russia. They point to the dangers latent in the results of our 
own parsimonious educational expenditure — 25 per cent, of the 
adult males in America illiterate ; only six in a hundred of those 
claiming special trade experience experts; our industries shot 
through with ca' canny, sabotage, and all the by-products of 
a sluggish mental life; our municipal, state, and even federal 
governments the easy prey of the demagogue, the ward heeler 
and the self-seeking politicaster ; the instinct of workmanship 
and the inventive genius of the masses balked, paralyzed, dead- 
ened. And they argue, wisely as authorities like Dewey, Veblen, 
Marot, and Tead seem to think, that the spirit of creative 
workmanship cannot be effectively generated under the condi- 
tions of modern machine industry by early vocational speciali- 



Meredith College Bulletin 9 

zation; that a general quickening of the mental life of all the 
people through the widest possible "increase and diffusion of 
knowledge among men" can alone release the craftsmanly in- 
stinct which is inbred in the race. The essential increased 
production of wealth and its more efficient distribution would 
follow, they believe, as it did under the quickening inspiration 
of the war, as the inevitable by-product of an education di- 
rected, not in the first instance toward concrete utilitarian 
ends, but to the liberation of the creative impulses which are 
the glory and the richest asset of mankind. 

* * sf{ * * * * * 

The relevance of these programs of political and industrial 
reconstruction is that they express the judgment of the most 
influential body of workers in England and America as to the 
practical means that must be adopted to make the realization 
of their program for the democratization of educational oppor- 
tunity possible. The growing prestige of the fourth estate is 
the characteristic fact of our generation. What is convention- 
ally described as the rise of the proletariat has been attended 
by a flurry of. nervous apprehension among those who fear 
that the controlling motive of the workers is a kind of barba- 
rian envy, a brutal desire on the part of the propertyless to 
possess themselves of the property which "superior ability" 
has allotted to others. We hear a great deal about the follies 
of "dividing up," of expropriation, confiscation, and reckless 
plunder as the insensate craving of this modern Samson who, 
in a blind effort to free himself, would pull the pillars of 
organized society down upon his own head. But a considerate 
examination of the workers' educational program should go 
far to still such fears in the minds of those who are themselves 
free from envy and luxurious self-indulgence. Men who dream 
of the democratization of knowledge, of science and the liberal 
arts as the chief end of civilized government will not ruthlessly 
destroy the recognized material foundations of civilized life. 
Rather they will seek to strengthen those foundations and 
broaden them. For it is their eager and instinctive hunger 
for the spiritual values of life that principally accounts for 
their growing insistence upon the extension of the democratic 
principle in industry, for the humanization of industrial pro- 
cesses, for the more equal distribution of the benefits that ac- 
crue from the national surplus. Their programs of political 
and social reconstruction are inspired by their realization that 



10 Meredith College Bulletin 

it is only when all men are guaranteed equality of educational 
opportunity that any man can be certain of access to the spir- 
itual banquet of life. They have been compelled by the con- 
ditions of their lives, as no other social group has been com- 
pelled, to accept' Christ's Great Commandment as the first rule 
of political conduct. 



Meredith College Bulletin 11 



Extract from "The Colleges and the Nation 1 '' 

Arthur Twining Hadley 

President of Yale University 

[These brief extracts by no means represent the main points made by President 
Hadley ; they are selected because they show his attitude towards the classics, j 

One group of educational reformers would make the col- 
lege course frankly vocational. They point out that the student 
of law or medicine or engineering, who has a professional mo- 
tive, habitually works harder than the student of literature 
or history, who has only the ordinary college motives to domi- 
nate him. They believe that our colleges and schools would 
be better off if the subjects were so chosen that each pupil 
could see the relation between what he did and the class-room 
and what he was going to do in his life afterwards. 

They also believe that this change would be good for the 
country. Both in peace and in war Germany had the ad- 
vantage over the Allies, and particularly over England and the 
United States, in the abundance of technically-trained men at 
her command. In drugs and in dyes, in optical instruments 
and in air-planes, Germany could do things which we could 
not, because she had the men to do them ; not a few individuals 
only, but large bodies of trained scientific workers. 

All of these arguments are sound as far as they go. They 
prove the necessity of more technical training than we have 
at present. But they do not prove that technical training 
should be allowed to crowd out training in the duties of the 
citizen or the ideals of the scholar. The war has shown that 
if we had to choose between the two groups of subjects, the 
"liberal arts" taught in the colleges of America and England 
and Erance are more fundamentally necessary than the tech- 
nical arts taught by Germany. The most enthusiastic Amer- 
ican advocate of vocational training would scarcely be willing 
to have us purchase it at the price which the Germans have 
paid. 

We shall undoubtedly provide more space for vocational 
training in the college courses of the future than we have done 
in the past. Particularly will this be true of training in 
medicine and other forms of applied science which involve 
education of the hand and eye as well as of the mind, and must 



1 Copyright Harper and Brothers (June 1919). Reprinted by courtesy of 
President Hadley and of Harper's Magazine. 



12 Meredith College Bulletin 

be begun early in order to secure the necessary proficiency. 
But there is no indication that the American public will allow 
professional study to monopolize all the years of a student's 
freedom and thus destroy the usefulness of those years as a 
means of training for citizenship. 

And what will become of the college life of older days, amid 
all these changes? This is a question frequently asked by 
graduates who recognize the trend of the times, but fear that 
the useful and thorough education which their children will 
obtain may result in driving the poetry out of school and col- 
lege life. I do not think that there is any serious ground for 
such apprehension. The life of the college depends on the 
traditions and ideals of the place rather than on the subjects 
studied. Four years spent in a place of high intellectual 
standards, with chances for reading and opportunities for see- 
ing distinguished men, have pretty much the same influence on 
the student, whatever the particular subject to which he may 
devote his attention. For more than a century Oxford has 
devoted itself to the classics and Cambridge to mathematics; 
yet there are no two institutions in the world more alike than 
Oxford and Cambridge. Particularly strong is this collegiate 
influence when a university enjoys, as Oxford and Cambridge 
have done, the benefit of beautiful buildings — a thing which 
Cardinal Newman rightly emphasizes as one of the most 
effective means of education which we have at our command. 

Nor need the lover of the past apprehend that the study of 
the classics will disappear from the face of the earth. It is 
true that they can no longer claim the position of special 
privilege in the curriculum which they enjoyed a hundred 
years ago. They must take their chances with other subjects. 
But Latin, when rightly taught, is an invaluable instrument 
of general education. Good foreign language teaching is a 
necessary element in high school and college work; partly be- 
cause it is easier to teach a pupil to read with exact attention 
in a foreign language, and partly because it is easier to give 
tests which make it clear that he has done his share of the 
work and is acquiring power as well as knowledge. There are 
only two foreign languages which any considerable portion 
of our high schools were teaching well — Latin and German. 
We shall develop good French teaching and good Spanish 
teaching in time ; but for the moment the gap left by the disuse 



Meredith College Bulletin 13 

of German must be filled by Latin or not at all. The prejudice 
against the study of German which has been created by the war 
has given Latin its chance. It is for the classical teachers to 
show that they are equal to the opportunity which lies before 
them. 



ts" 



14 Meredith College Bulletin 



The Classics and the "Practical" Argument 1 

Fkank M. Colby 

(Editor of the Interna tio:na:l Year Book) 

If I were a classical scholar, I should not rest my case on 
what is called the argument from practical life. It may be 
gratifying if one can cite a dozen bank presidents who are in 
favor of teaching the elements of Latin and Greek, but it is a 
short-lived joy. Some one before long will surely cite two 
dozen bank presidents who are against it. I have just fin- 
ished reading the fifteenth article published within the last 
two years in which the writer rounds up in defense of the 
classics a considerable number of the politically, commercially, 
and scientifically successful persons of the moment. There are 
one President, two ex-Presidents, two Secretaries of State, and 
a handsome showing of administrators, bankers, heads of trust 
and insurance companies, engineers, mathematicians, electri- 
cians, economists, botanists, zoologists, psychologists, physisists, 
and chemists. This may have been a more bountiful and se- 
ductive list than any anti-classical man had produced at that 
moment, but it is not a more bountiful one than he could pro- 
duce, if you gave him time. It contains fifty professors of 
science, both pure and applied. The man who could not within 
a week produce fifty-five on the other side would not be worth 
his salt as an anti-classical debater. Then the unfortunate 
writer of the first article would have to find five more, and 
thus the debate would resolve itself into a mad competitive 
scramble for botanists, engineers, business men, and the like, 
to which, so far as I can see, there would be no logical con- 
clusion till they had all been caught and tabulated. And 
after this was all done, we should be just where we were when 
we started. For the success of these successful persons is not 
a successful test. 

If the majority of them knew, what they never could know — 
that is to say that they presided, banked, administered, engi- 
neered, insured, botanized, and psychologized no better for their 
study of the classics, the question of the classics would still be as 
open as before. As human beings they were probably engaged 
during a considerable portion of their lives in doing other 
things than climbing into presidencies or directing banks or 

1 Copyright Harper and Brothers (October, 1919). Reprinted by courtesy of 
Mr. Colby and Harper's Magazine. 



Meredith College Bulletin 15 

building bridges or organizing other human beings. If not, 
they were forlorn creatures whom it is not desirable to repro- 
duce. As human beings their leisure was probably a matter 
of some practical concern to them. Statistics of success cannot 
decide a question that pertains to their personal leisure. I 
doubt if statistics of success can decide any question at all, 
when the standard of success is the vague, unstable, arbitrary 
thing implied in these discussions. JSTobody wants his own 
life regulated by the way a chance majority of these successful 
persons happen to feel about theirs. Still less would he want 
his children to be brought up only to resemble them. Every 
plain person realizes that there is a vast domain of thought, 
feeling, and activity, including religion, music, poetry, painting, 
sport, dancing, among many other things that subsists quite 
independently of the good or bad opinion of any motley group 
of persons picked out by educators as successful at this day. 

When they tell you that some railway manager thinks that 
Latin has helped him in his labors and that he stills reads 
Horace for pleasure, they are telling you nothing either for 
or against the study of Latin. Even an educator would not 
be any more eager to have his daughter learn to dance, if he 
knew that the chief justice of the Supreme Court had danced 
regularly through his career for its beneficial effects upon his 
profession, and was still dancing at almost every idle moment 
of the day just for the pleasure of it. He does not want the 
doings of the chief justice to mold his daughter's life in all 
particulars. He probably would just as lief she did not re- 
semble in many ways that undoubtedly respectable person. 

And the question of the classics is in this outside domain, 
whatever their casual relation may be to a random group of 
professional, business, and scientific activities. It may be that 
the best poetry in the English language is detested by the one 
thousand ablest executives in this country at this moment. 
Indeed, it probably is. But that has no relevance to a ques- 
tion of its value. Even in the wildest educational articles of 
the month, you do not find this fact advanced as a conclusive 
argument from practical life for the promotion of the detes- 
tation of poetry. Nobody takes the child aside and says "Hate 
poetry and up you go to the very top of the dry goods business." 

But perhaps educators do not really attach any importance 
to this nonsense. They are, no doubt, more sensible than they 
seem. There is no use in taking the malign view of educators 



16 Meredith College Bulletin 

that their personalities resemble their usual educational articles. 
They probably no not believe any more than I do in a neat 
hierarchy of success with the better man always a peg above 
the worse one, or that if you skim the cream of contemporary 
celebrities you will have a collection of more practical lives than 
if you had taken the next layer or the layer below that. Prac- 
tical lives, as led in Germany during the last forty years or so, 
must begin to seem to them now somewhat visionary. And 
they can hardly retain a sublime confidence in the standards 
of success of thir own generation, which, though equipped with 
the very latest modern efficiency tests and appliances, never- 
theless reverted overnight almost to a state of cannibalism. 
They probably would admit that instead of compelling the next 
generation to resemble the sort of persons that society has often 
permitted to become uppermost in this, it might be only humane 
to give it a fair chance of not resembling them. When you 
read the language of educational disputes tradition begins to 
seem a reasonable thing. Educational debaters argue with an 
air of mathematical certainty, as if working out an equation, 
and then produce a solution containing such hopelessly unknown 
quantities as the value of the opinion of fifty-seven more or 
less accidentally important persons as to the sort of lives all 
the rest of the world should live. 

And I should take tradition rather than the word of Mr. 
H. G. Wells in his latest two novels on the subject of edu- 
cation. I believe the classical tradition had more to do with 
the making of Mr. H. G. Wells than any treatise on biology 
that he ever read. Mr. Wells has more in common with Plato 
than he has with Herbert Spencer, and it is because he writes 
more in the style of thePhsedo than he does in the style of The 
Principles of Sociology that we read him. If Mr. Wells con- 
siders Plato a dull old fool, as he probably does, that has nothing 
to do with it. He has absorbed since his nativity a literature 
that has been steeped for many centuries in the writings of 
these old fogies he despises. In a sense they own him, so far 
as there is anything in him that is worth permanently pos- 
sessing. Mr. Wells is essentially a very ancient person, but, 
being strangely incapable of self-analysis, he does not know 
how he came by a large part of his incentives and suggestions. 
That is why he has latterly so often moved in circles redis- 
covering old thoughts that antedate the Christian era, and 
thinking they were new. If an archeologist examined Mr. 



Meredith College Bulletin 17 

Wells, lie would find him full of the ruins of ancient Kome, 
and he is much the brisker writer for containing them. No- 
body would be reading Mr. H. G. Wells today if he were a mere 
product of contemporary science. If he could have applied 
his theory of education to his own bringing-up he would have 
committed literary suicide. 

A more obvious instance is that of one of Mr. Well's imme- 
diate literary ancestors. Samuel Butler in The Way of All 
Flesh is almost as ferocious toward Latin and Greek as he is 
toward fathers and mothers. He suggests no substitute for 
Latin or Greek any more than he suggests a substitute for the 
family, but he implies that all three should be abandoned 
instantly on the chance that substitutes may turn up. JN"ow I 
know that the radicalism of Samuel Butler in respect to these 
and other matters is what mainly interests the modern com- 
mentator. But it has nothing to do with his permanent 
interest. Dozens of more radical writers can be found every- 
where who are exceedingly dull. The value of The Way of 
All Flesh is in its texture — the weaving together of a thousand 
small things — and not in a few large, central thoughts. Essen- 
tially it is in the best tradition of the English novel. Also it 
is hopelessly entangled with the classics. He has to make his 
hero take honors in them at the university in order to get the 
muscle to attack them. He is a prize-fighter who knocks his 
boxing-masters down to show how little he has learned from 
them. 



18 Meredith College Bulletin 



What to Do For Greek 1 

Paul Shorey 
University of Chicago 

About a year ago, standing in Richmond before the stately 
monument to Jefferson Davis and the soldiers of the Con- 
federacy, I observed a group of school children copying into 
their note books the lame English hexameters of the Simoni- 
dean inscription set there originally in defiant vindication of 
a lost cause, but now chiefly expressive of the essential soul 
of northern and southern, of Greek and American, patriotism. 
Here as elsewhere the profound human experience inevitably 
recalled to sensitive spirits its beautiful and definitive Greek 
expression. "Oblivion/ 7 said Lowell, "looks into the face of the 
Grecian muse only to forget her errand." 

"Who will deliver us from those Greeks and Latins?" ex- 
claimed the old French poet. Surely not the world-war, 
despite the endeavors of our enterprising colleagues of the 
school of education to exploit that blessed Mespotamian word 
"reconstruction" for the suppression of Latin and mathematics 
and the installation of such practical, scientific, experimental, 
and excitingly adventurous subjects as social control — no, I 
have confused my "controls" — I mean muscular control of the 
voluntary wig- wagging of the ears : 

There was a young man who said, "Why 
Can't I look in my ear with my eye? 

If I set my mind to it 

I'm sure I could do it 
You never can tell till you try." 

But it takes all kinds of people to make a world, and mean- 
while other young men were carrying pocket-copies of Homer 
and Horace into the trenches, reading Herodotus with fresh 
zest on the Mesopotamian front, writing home to plan the 
completion and publication of dissertations that would "settle 
Inoti's business and properly base oun." And to consecrate 



1 Reprinted from Classical Journal, (October, 1919), by courtesy of Professor 
Shorey. 



Meredith College Bulletin 19 

the memory of some of them who will never come home in the 
flesh, the century of the new reformed education again remem- 
bered Simonides. 

When you go home tell them of us and say, 
"For your tomorrow they gave their today." 
Tell England, you who pass this monument, 
We died for her and rest here well content. 

Well, what does that prove? as the eminent mathematician 
said of Paradise Lost. I am not yet undertaking to prove 
anything. I am telling you, slightly elaborated and idealized 
in the retrospect, some of the reflections excited in my mind 
by that Simonidean inscription. With a teacher's eagerness 
to share and impart these great thoughts I turned to the school 
children and volunteered the information: '"The inscription 
which you are copying is from the Greek." "Is that so?" 
was the reply. "It's Creek, is it?" They had heard of the 
Creek Indians, but toward Greek their attitude was that of the 
mediseval monks, whose sole comment on Greek quotations in 
Latin manuscripts was : "Grsecum est non legitur." 

This anti-climax, this comic contrast between the Greek 
professor's reflections and the children's response, points the 
paradox of the present situation of Greek. While the nomi- 
nal study of Greek has been suppressed in the high school, and 
the classes are dwindling in the colleges, our universities 
have developed a scholarship which we never possessed before, 
and which it would be a pity to starve and let die at' the very 
time when the world needs it most. For in the breakdown and 
reorganization for practical necessities of the European edu- 
cation it is not altogether fanciful to suppose that it may 
prove to be the temporary mission of the American university 
to carry on that torch of Hellenism which Italy, France, En- 
gland and Germany had borne in turn. Though the Greek 
scholars of America are all too few, though they are unorganized 
and accustomed to dependence on Europe, the achievements 
of the past twenty years show that with reasonable encourage- 
ment they are not altogether inadequately prepared to sustain 
this role. The maintenance and development of this promis- 
ing but as yet precarious school of the new Greek scholarship 
were only a feather in America's cap, merely a decorative 
inutility, it might still be urged that America could well afford 
it. Our expenditure on chewing gums would pay for all our 
Greek departments three or four times over. The trustees 



20 Meredith College Bulletin 

of our great universities as intelligent and practical idealists 
appreciate the truth which I have ventured to emphasize by 
this homely illustration. It will, I believe, be their policy to 
support the new Greek scholarship of America regardless of 
the size of the classes. 

America is very large and has many universities. The 
demand for really well trained Hellenists will for some years 
exceed the supply, and no young man who feels the vocation, 
who is conscious of the ability to make of himself a genuine 
scholar and teacher, need fear that he will miss the scholar's 
reward of an assured, if somewhat ascetically measured, com- 
petence. This is the aspect of the Greek question which first 
presents itself to one who has taught only graduate students 
for the past twenty years. But I need not say that it is not 
the Greek question. Quite apart from the danger that the 
ambitious superstructure must ultimately collapse if the sup- 
ports from below are withdrawn, it is the Hellenist's faith 
that Greek studies differ not merely in degree but in kind 
from Oriental and other philological and antiquarian pur- 
suits. By virtue of the intrinsic charm and stimulating power 
of the Greek language and literature, and by reason also of 
their historic influence on the actual course of European 
thought, the place and the function of these studies in modern 
education can never be reduced to that of a narrow specialty 
cultivated by a few experts occupied solely in training up their 
successors. They must in some reasonable measure enter into 
what for lack of a better name we describe as "general cul- 
ture" and "liberal education." This obviously does not mean 
the reinstatement of a universal requirement of Greek in col- 
leges and high schools. It does mean keeping the doors of 
opportunity open; in Lowell's vivid phase, "giving the horse a 
chance at the ancient springs before concluding that he will 
not drink." I am not concerned in these brief limits with 
educational machinery, but with the spirit in which it is to 
be worked. The distractions, the necessities, the solicitations 
of modern knowledge, are infinite. Every thoughtful clas- 
sicist is aware that many students have no time for classical 
studies and many others no aptitude or tast'e for them. But 
he also knows that the perpetual, unfair, and unreasonable 
disparagement of them by newspapers, schools of education, 
deans, fanatical modernists, pseudo-scientists, and, alas, some 
real scientists who cannot see that the old issue of science and 



Meredith College Bulletin 21 

classics is dead — that all this deters and discourages students 
who have the time and could soon acquire the taste. In our 
busy modern world the direct study of Greek must be increas- 
ingly left to those whose instinct divines the best and whose 
aspiration will acquiesce in nothing less. Though the per- 
centage of these may be relatively small, in our huge America 
they are collectively many. And what the Hellenist asks is 
that these instincts be not suppressed and these aspirations 
thwarted by unfair and invidious suggestion. Apart from all 
questions of machinery he wants in our schools and colleges a 
temper, a tone, a spirit, an atmosphere, in which the study of 
the world's longest-lived and most beautiful language and most 
original and most influential literature can live. So much an 
intelligent modernist professor of education or scientific man 
ought to concede even when most irritated by the polemical 
petulance to which the strain of a perpetual defensive sometimes 
tempts the classicist in his written or spoken discourse. 

For, controversy aside, all reasonable educators would wish 
every study, every intellectual interest, t'o have a place in the 
curriculum fairly proportionate to its real significance for our 
present life and culture. Greek is merely the 'most conspicuous 
example, the type of all the cultural studies whose value and 
place in the curriculum have fluctuated most widely and which 
are now threatened with extinction by the so-called practical 
spirit of the age and the temporary unsettlement of all spiritual 
values by the Great War. For the Revival of Learning Greek 
meant not only culture and discipline, but progress, philosophy, 
and science. Since the Renaissance there have been times 
when in the prescribed curricula of English and Amrican col- 
leges Greek claimed an attention disproportionate to its real 
relative significance. That is ancient history. It is quite 
certain that now, as a result of the controversies of the past 
fifty years and the consequent unfriendliness of schools of 
education and too many teachers of science, Greek studies are 
unreasonably depressed in our schools. Discussion will not 
cease until something like the right proportion is restored. The 
Greek question will not down. It cannot possibly weary my 
audiences so much as it does me who have several times said 
my say carefully and explicitly in print. I had infinitely 
rather interpret the platonic philosophy and write articles on 
de ge than deliver apologies for the classics and read lectures 
on the Greek genius. But that is beside the point. Whether 



22 Meredith College Bulletin 

I or another bear the burden and give the offense, the debate 
will continue till the matter is "settled right/' and a reasonable 
adjustment established. Individual Greek professors may cyni- 
cally retire into their shells and perfect their theory of the 
irregular verbs in the confidence that their chairs will last 
their time. Particular audiences may be bored to extinction 
with disquisitions on the Hellenism of the Greek genius. Indi- 
vidual modernists may ask why, since Greek is obviously mori- 
bund, it is so shamelessly long in dying, and why can't it be 
decently buried and disposed of. Individual professors of 
pedagogy may be exasperated to the verge of profanity by our 
insistence on reviving what they deem a dead issue. It will 
nevertheless always be revived by somebody and the discussion 
will go on. It would be revived even if the study of Greek 
were altogether extinguished in a complete collapse of culture 
and a new dark age and we had to begin all over again with 
a new Renaissance. Greek, is in short, too fine and big a 
thing for the human spirit willingly to let die. 

The proof and confirmation of these assertions is the theme 
of the typical plea for Greek which was delivered by Muretus 
in his inaugural lecture on Plato at Pome in 1573 and will 
be delivered by some New Zealand or Fiji Island professor in 
2573. Perfunctorily repeated in conventional rhetoric and 
unconvincing tones this plea is a weariness to the flesh. Re- 
newed by inmost conviction and genuine knowledge it will 
interest and almost convince a modern audience. In the 
opinion of the judicious we have had the best of the argument 
in the past ten years. The check to a practical reaction in 
our favor is the lingering doubt whether in the press of more 
imperious needs the modern student has time for Greek. I 
can only indicate two of the answers to the difficulty which I 
expect to elaborate elsewhere. One of these is a debater's 
point and the other a more substantive consideration. The 
obvious and conclusive debater's point is that the uselessness 
of Greek can be urged only in favor of a curriculum that 
includes no studies equally useless in the lower sense of the 
word utility. A rigid curriculum in physical and technical 
science may consistently exclude Greek on this ground. ~No 
curriculum that admits the older literatures of England, Prance, 
or Italy or any serious and considerable study of literature, 
philosophy, or history can. 



Meredith College Bulletin 23 

The substantive point is the neglected consideration of the 
value of even a little Greek. Here I can only outline reasons 
which I hope to work out in a monograph. To weigh the 
considerations on the value of a little knowledge, which are 
common to all studies — a little Greek imperfectly remembered 
may be of practical use in several specific ways. If properly 
taught it may make Homer a possession for life, and vivify 
and make real the enormous and growing modern literature 
of interpretation and criticism of Greek things. It gives some 
sort of a key — the ability to use a dictionary at least — to the 
immense and ever-increasing technical and scientific vocabulary 
derived directly from the Greek. I developed this topic before 
an audience of eminent physicians last winter and had no 
difficulty in convincing them — or rather their own experience 
convinced them. There are, as I remember, thirteen consecu- 
tive double-columned pages in the Century Dictionary, every 
word of which is Greek. A day rarely passes in which my 
reading does not present me with a new technical term that 
I understand from the Greek. And do not answer me that I 
am a specialist. My argument is that the possessor of even 
a little Greek is in a better position to look up and understand 
the meaning of such a word than he who knows none. Third 
and lastly, even a little Greek is some sort of key t'o the longest- 
lived continually spoken and written great language on earth, 
and one whose influence in eastern Europe and the United 
States is on the increase. The shop signs in Khartoum are 
Greek. On the wharf at San Francisco I understood a pro- 
clamation to the Greek emigrants by means of a word which 
I had never seen elsewhere except in Homer. And do not tell 
me that this little Greek is forgotten and that mental discipline 
is a myth. For I have read in Professor Calparede's Experi- 
mental Pedagogy that the pedagogical psychology which you 
have forgotten will still do you good, and I have learned from 
Professor Thorndike that the manipulation of educational 
statistics trains the mind in quantitative methods generally, 
and I have been taught by a professor of vocational education 
that a high-school course in typewriting, even though it is 
never used in after-life, remains a valuable discipline in 
accuracy. 

But conceding all this, you ask what is to be done. I have 
no panacea, and do not believe in the discovery of royal roads 
to culture and education. Pestalozzi was convinced that our 



24 Meredith College Bulletin 

present studies do not require one-tenth of the time or trouble 
we now give to them. And sentimentalists, charlatans, rheto- 
ricians, and denunciatory reformers unscrupulously repeat 
similar exaggerations. The Education of Henry Adams avers 
that he could learn by rational methods more Latin and 
Greek in a few weeks than the Latin school and college taught 
in many years. There is bad teaching of Greek, as of all 
other subjects. By all means let us teach it better, more 
effectively, more spiritedly. I have been trying to do so for 
thirty years. The most popular type of article in educational 
journals is "How I Taught Beginners' Latin or Xenophon's 
Anabasis Better Than It "Was Ever Taught Before." But I 
have no time to tell you how much better than anybody else 
I am now teaching Homer and Plato in the University of 
Chicago's summer quarter. No matter how well we taught, 
the second most popular type of educational article would be 
the denunciation of the dry-as-dust gerund-grinder who never 
gave the spirit of the classics but only drilled on the verbs in-m. 
It is an established convention and an irresistible theme of 
rhetorical variations. Seneca nearly two thousand years ago 
anticipated Mr. H. G. Wells and a certain eloquent Ohio super- 
intendent of schools in the complaint that we have professors 
of everything except of "life." And to skip intervening ex- 
amples, Mr. Winston Churchill, after denouncing the teachers 
who made him hate Vergil and the Greek classics, tells how dur- 
ing an excursion of the Bureau of University Travel "I saw 
framed through a port-hole rose-red Seriphus set in a living blue 
that paled the sapphire. ... In that port-hole glimpse a 
Thejmistocles was revealed, a Socrates, a Homer, a Phidias, an 
Aeschylus, and a Pericles — I saw the Roman Empire." No 
reform of our teaching will enable us to compete with so cheap 
and expeditious a crystal-gazing apocalypse as that. And 
such specific recommendations in practical pedagogy as expe- 
rience suggests to me I must reserve for other occasions and 
ampler space. 

Apart from improved teaching, the only practical thing to 
be done for Greek is the creation (in the high school and 
college) of the atmosphere of which I spoke — an atmosphere 
in which Greek studies can live. That rests not with the 
teachers of Greek, but mainly with the teachers of Latin and 
English. They can do it if they choose. And it is surely for 
their interest in both the higher and lower sense of the word 



Meredith College Bulletin 25 

that they should choose. It is superfluous to remind trained 
Latinists of the interdependence of Greek and Latin studies 
and of the relation of every phase of Roman life and literature 
to some Greek source of suggestion and inspiration. They 
know this, and when they leave the university they intend to 
act on it. But in the practical routine of teaching they some- 
times succumb too easily to the pressure of a hostile environ- 
ment, and allow their natures to be subdued by the material 
in which they are compelled to work. You are teaching Yergil. 
Your superintendent has written a book. Most of my peda- 
gogical enemies have written books which I have read, and this 
particular superintendent says — I quote verbatim : "A teacher 
of Latin read to his pupils the Houseboat on the Styx in con- 
nection with the reading of the Aeneid. It was good fun for 
them all and never was Yergil more highly honored than in 
the assiduous study which these young people gave to his 
lines. They were eager to complete the study of the lesson in 
order to have more time for the Houseboat." 

This somehow irresistibly recalled the plowmen on Achilles' 
shield who received a beaker of wine at the end of each furrow 
and then turned back eager to arrive at the end of the furrow. 
Do I need to explain why I hope that you will not follow the 
line of least resistance and the pedagogical methods approved 
by this official expert? Granted that a few selections from 
the Houseboat on the Styx might, in default of anything 
better, enliven a class in Aristophanes' Frogs or Lucian's 
Dialogues of the Dead, is it not obvious that this trivial travesty 
is fatal to the mood and spiritual temper of a classroom that 
is to appreciate the serene, pathetic, and elegant poetry of the 
mage Yergil? But that is by the way. The main considera- 
tion is that the time to be spared from construing is limited, 
and instead of wasting it on the Houseboat on the Styx you 
might use it to read and explain to the class typical selections 
that would illustrate how Yergil summarizes and distils all 
the culture of the Greek centuries that preceded him and 
transmits it to the mediaeval and English centuries that were 
to follow him. If you do this pedantically and in excess and 
in slavish imitation of university methods, you will confuse 
and bewilder your students and waste time that is needed for 
the main business of learning Latin. But if you do it tem- 
perately and with discretion, though some of the class may 
stare stupidly and wonder what you would be at, you will in 



26 Meredith College Bulletin 

the end have your reward. Continued faithfully, a little at 
a time through the year, such teaching will kindle the divine 
fire of literary appreciation in the minds of some of the class 
at least, it will give them some dim apprehension of the unity 
of European literature and of the human spirit — and, what 
is more to our present point, it will probably induce two or 
three of them to elect beginning Greek in the Freshman year 
of college. In other words, instead of trying to make Latin 
interesting by mere tricks and entertainments that divert the 
mind from the real values that make it worth while to study 
Latin at all, we should seek interest — of course after the direct 
understanding and enjoyment of the text — in the appreciation 
of Latin as the unifier of all cultural history and the mediator 
between Hellenism and the modern world. This has an ambi- 
tious sound, but I assume a little common sense in the appli- 
cation. 

At any rate, it is for the larger interest of teachers of Latin 
and teachers of English to teach in this way with some con- 
sciousness of the relation of their material to the Greek tradi- 
tion, not merely in order to do something for Greek but in 
order that they may save themselves. It is possible that, what- 
ever happens to Greek, the mechanical teaching of Latin and 
English will last' your time, and you will continue to draw 
your salaries. But I assume that you take a more generous 
and liberal view of educational policies than that. And from 
this higher, broader point of view it is quite certain that the 
temper of jealous obscurantism which exults in the prospect 
of the extermination of the last survivals of Greek from the 
high school will in a few years destroy any teaching of Latin 
and English literature in which a truly refined and cultivated 
spirit could take refuge. The Bolshevists of modernism pro- 
pose to destroy all the vested interests of the humanistic 
tradition, all the capitalization of our historic culture by the 
repudiation of our debt to the past, the demonetization of all 
poetic gold that has stood the test of time, and to flood the 
schools with the fiat paper currency of the journalistic literature 
of the hour and the text-books of the pseudo-sciences. Were 
I to publish this address, the austere Hellenists of the New 
Republic would perhaps again deplore the failure of Greek 
sophrosune and Horatian urbanity in an unworthy spokesman 
of academic culture. But whatever may be thought of the ele- 
gance of its perhaps too curious elaboration, the logic of this 



Meredith College Bulletin 27 

little allegory runs exactly parallel to tlie facts. There is no 
phase or phrase of the imagery which I could not justify by 
quotations from the books of men prominent in the official 
world of education today. Greek is only a symbol, a pretext, 
and the first point of attack. What they desire is the sup- 
pression of all intellectual distinctions in every sense of the 
word "distinction." They would abolish all studies that they 
do not themselves understand or appreciate — a large order. 
They do not wish anything taught in their schools that would 
spoil the student's taste for their textbooks, or teach him to 
challenge their logic. They call this debasing of the intel- 
lectual and educational currency giving the public what it 
wants and meeting the pupil on his own level. But what they 
really propose is to give the public what they want the public 
to want and to meet the pupil on the level of the undisciplined 
and lower selves of the inferior half of the class. Again I 
shall be rebuked for intemperate exaggeration. But I am aware 
of the exceptions. There are of course many refined and cul- 
tivated men who from carelessness or prejudice make common 
cause with the assailants of all humanistic culture. 

There are still more who in the presence of a critical audi- 
ence will hedge and qualify and try to express themselves with 
the apparent sweet reasonableness of President Eliot. But' what 
do they say when they go before a State Legislature, or a 
meeting of the rustic teachers' association, or in the class 
rooms of the school of education? Some of you know by 
bitter experience. And I have read and analyzed too many of 
their books to be deceived in their prevailing temper and 
purpose. 

"The principal of the great western high school," writes 
a notorious Bolshevistic popularizer in a book on the new 
education, "which housed nearly two thousand children pointed 
to one room in which a tiny class bent over their books. 'That 
is probably the last class in Greek that we shall ever have in 
this school,' he said. 'They are sophomores. Only two fresh- 
men elected Greek this fall and we decided not to form the 
class." What do you suppose is that writer's and that prin- 
cipal's real opinion about Yergil, and the "waning classic" 
Dante, and Milton, and the relative merits of Shakespeare 
and Bernard Shaw, and "such literary sawdust" as Burke's 
"Speech on Conciliation," "The Ancient Mariner," and "Ly- 
cidas," and for that matter about Tennyson, Matthew Arnold 



28 Meredith College Bulletin 

or Lowell ? But I don't need to suppose, for I have the evidence 
in print and only lack of space prevents me from submitting 
it to you. 

There is nothing that we Greek teachers can do for Greek 
except guard the fire within, teach as well as we can, and amuse 
our leisure by "gunning for" pseudo-scientists. The woods are 
full of them, and the entire year is open season. If we can 
once get into the minds of our colleagues of the physical 
sciences our seriously meant distinction between science and 
pseudo-science, we may prepare the way for an alliance that 
may preserve not merely Greek, which is incidental, but the 
disciplines and cultures of which Greek is now only a symbol. 
But until our scientific colleagues have laid aside the preju- 
dices of now-obsolete controversies, the main line of defense 
will be held by the teachers of Latin and English. There are 
enough of you to resist the encroachments of the spirit that 
has destroyed Greek and is now preparing to debase and vul- 
garize and enfeeble you. You can if you choose influence the 
plastic minds of the children co mm itted to your care. You 
can create and maintain in your schools an atmosphere that 
will preserve your studies and may reinstate Greek. You 
need not unless you choose in spirit serve and obsequiously 
obey the dictators 

Who con their ritual of routine, 
With minds to one dead likeness blent, 
And never even in dreams have seen 
The things that are more excellent. 

But to achieve this freedom and this influence you must 
yourselves be and embody all which you would impart. And 
you must not be discouraged by the unfriendliness of your 
environment or the recalcitrance of your material. Never 
was there a greater falsity than the current commonplace that 
it is impossible to teach literature. Creative literary genius 
is of course incommunicable. But the sense for literature in 
its power to refine and ennoble feeling, to criticize and trans- 
figure life and dignity mortal suffering and frailty, can be 
gradually but surely imparted by anybody who has rightly 
learned to appreciate it himself. You cannot do this all at 
once and for everybody, but you can in the long run and for 
enough to be richly worth while. It is a pernicious half-truth 



Meredith College Bulletin 29 

that inculcates the necessity of meeting the student on his own 
level. In practice it means meeting him on the lowest common 
level of the relaxed self of both teacher and pupil. If you have 
a higher self and a higher level to exhibit day by day in the 
classroom, there is something in the soul of the pupil that will 
in the end respond despite the new sophists who, like the old, 
proclaim that the sunlight only dazzles the practical vision and 
that it is better to hug your chains contentedly amid the 
shadows of excellence down in the cave of Philistinism. To 
all such let your answer be: 

And still doth life with starry towers 
Lure to the bright divine ascent; 
Be yours the things ye would, he ours 
The things that are more excellent. 



30 Meredith College Bulletin 

Does Education Mean Happiness? 1 

It is a specious and a shallow saying of the conservative 
thinker that to make the many wise is but to multiply misery. 
To fill a man doomed to navvy's toil or the dullest routine 
with Platonic dreams and liberal aspirations is to mock his 
chains. Why bring beauty to the caged clerk and leave him 
to mourn her violation? Did not those very Greek philos- 
ophers, of whom our sentimental Democrats are apt to dis- 
course so fondly and so ineptly, segregate the herd of artisans 
from the fair and fine ? They knew well the truth which Pope 
rhymed later for our guidance, that short draughts from the 
Pierian spring are the most fatal intoxicants, that culture to 
be culture at all must be complete, and that the learned illiterate 
is the most hapless of beings. 

Thus the argument runs and those who, in Lord Morley's 
striking phrase, hold 'a vested interest in darkness/ are only 
too eager to use this screen against the insurgent rays. Many 
and various are the answers made to the charge, and yet another 
is forthcoming in a little book of recent publication. Mr. 
Harold Begbie in his Living Waters (Headley Bros.) has jotted 
down a series of interviews with workers of many types, a 
clerk, a doorkeeper, a collier, a Leeds Bolshevist, a Birmingham 
Ruskinian, all of whom describe for him the invasion of 
thought and learning in their souls. It is a plea for the 
energies of the "Workers' Educational Association, a journalist's 
plea if you will; but the interest of the book lies in the reve- 
lations of the talkers rather than in the comments of the 
listener. And so far from supporting the conservative asser- 
tion that book-learning brings only misery to those in poverty, 
the general verdict justifies adult education on grounds that 
would satisfy the strictest utilitarian. Por those men, at any 
rate, communion with the wisdom of the ages and the beauty 
of the world has not made their workaday lives intolerable. 
Rather has it so widened their gaze and increased their respon- 
siveness that only by this communion can life be endured. 
Their ignorance was never bliss : their wisdom has never been 
folly. The Pierian spring has never quenched a raging thirst 
and brought happiness without frenzy, joy without reaction. 

The word education suggests always to the British mind 
something hard and unlovable. Mention the word and we 

1 Reprinted from The Living Age (February 8, 1919) by kind permission of the 
editors. 



Meredith College Bulletin 31 

visualize a dreary room, bare forms, meaningless maps, and 
textbooks of jejune erudition, mere compendia of trivialities. 
That dread adjective 'educative,' clumsy and cacophonous, 
brings with it shuddering memories and dark imaginings : we 
think of stories with a high moral tone, topographical cinema 
films, lectures on the ant, and football for character's sake. 
Of all nations we are the most apt to call whatever we are doing 
our duty and to frown on any admission that we are enjoying 
it. It is typical of our ingrained Puritanism that we are 
always stressing the ethical side of education, never the hedo- 
nistic. Small wonder that education is unpopular, for there 
is nothing the public schoolboy hears more of and more heartily 
detests than the eternal chatter about character. If he is 
always being told that the object of his cricket is not the thrill 
of a well-timed drive nor the ecstacy of bowling an unplayable 
over, but the splendor of combination and 'playing the game,' 
if Yergil is presented to him not as poetry but as a mental 
gymnasium, wherein the difficulty and drudgery will bring out 
his perseverance, he will soon be equally exasperated with com- 
pulsory athletics and compulsory JEneid. The utilitarians 
made a tremendous assault on the permanent British assump- 
tion that happiness is something to be ashamed of, and in 
the end they failed. The assumption stand, and nowhere more 
firmly than in the class-room. We must seek truth to be good : 
we must seek truth to be rich and to be respectable; but we 
must never seek it to be happy. 

Yet against the conservative argument that education, save 
for the elect, is a short cut to misery and against the ascetic 
argument that happiness being a snare should never be the 
goal of education, the results achieved by the "W. E. A. are a 
permanent refutation. Once and for all it has been proved 
that the quest and capture of truth has been a source of real 
and abiding pleasure, not only to the academic few strutting 
it in some riverside hencoop of the Muses, but also to the 
nameless many, colliers and clerks, weavers and wives, snatching 
half -hours in seemingly impossible conditions in order to fling 
their net upon the flying joy. The case for the playing-fields 
of _Eton does not rest upon the hope that the future adminis- 
trators of the Empire will never do what is 'not cricket.' Nor 
does the case for extending adult education rest upon such 
grim phrases as 'betterment,' 'purer social order,' 'ameliora- 
tion of existing conditions.' True, these things matter ; but the 



32 Meredith College Bulletin 

cases rest fundamentally upon a simpler and a nobler word, 
Happiness. 

It may seem strange to the academic mind that the pursuit 
of knowledge and of truth as something good in itself should 
need any justification. Yet such a defense is gravely needed. 
Education is in danger to-day because it is being so much 
belauded. Its praises are sung in Philistia and reechoed in 
the cities of men. We must seek truth and ensue it, but not as 
an end. We must study history in order to be better impe- 
rialists, we must study science to increase production, we must 
study languages to control new markets and engineering to 
'speed up' anything that is not already rattling itself to death. 
Education is becoming popular. We are at last setting out 
to capture truth, and we may end by merely capturing trade. 

Technical education is necessary, and no balanced critic would 
disparage it. Ethical education is necessary and no sane 
citizen would see it banish. But most necessary now, because 
most neglected, is truth for truth's sake. Let us not in our 
commercial ambition and moral zeal forget the joy of know- 
ledge. And what a creative joy it is ! A knowledge of history 
may seem dull enough, yet it can turn a few odd hours in some 
old English town from a boredom to a pilgrimage of pleasure. 
Give but a slender pile of facts and a mere spark of imagination, 
and what a flaming beacon may not be kindled by things so 
common as an old earth fort, a Roman road, a ISTorman castle, 
some pots and pans, a harbor of the old adventurers, a town of 
the mediseval woolmen forgotten in the western wolds. It 
needs but a little history to set the plainest things teeming with 
suggestion and to render them fruitful in ideas. Science we 
may need be civilized, but also to be happy. A country walk 
may be good enough with its gift of air and health, but it 
becomes an infinitely richer thing when the secret of the birds 
and the flowers, the reason for their coming and going, the 
chart of their seasons and the conditions of their flourishing 
are known to the passer-by. Then not only are the senses 
medicined with the sleepy charms of the air, but every glade 
becomes an adventure, the movement of every beast a challenge 
to further understanding. Who has dipped into the lore of the 
earth finds gold in every quarry: who has read the ways of the 
birds finds joy unspeakable when by his own espionage he can 
disprove the wisdom of the books and yet add another pebble 
to the pyramid of truth. Pedantry kills: the classifying spe- 
cialist with his hoard of specimens and musty Latinity is the 



Meredith College Bulletin 33 

very miser of mental treasure, mistaking in true miser's fashion 
the sorry means for the noble end. But ignorance is not a whit 
better. Creative knowledge, fact kindling fancy — here lies 
the form and body of culture and this true education brings. 
]STever was there a time when men were more busily scheming 
and dreaming for the future: never, therefore, a time when 
men should have a clearer knowledge of the end they desire 
and be less easy prey to catchword and confusion. Big words 
are on every lip and big ideals in every mind. Only let them 
be clear. We talk of happiness and welfare : let us have them 
clearly defined. If happiness be the emotional companion of 
free functioning in response to the call of normal instinct and 
desire, if it be the by-product of unrepressed energy and bal- 
anced self-determination, then the happiness we aim at must 
include the free activities of the mind. Knowledge and thought 
must be recognized as being as essential to life as food and 
movement : they must be treasured as ends, not as means. Thus 
education will be released from its ancillary position. !No 
longer will the teacher be one who only opens the road to riches 
and position, or even to the negative virtue of "good form:" 
he will no longer create only paths to the good life; but the 
good life itself. He will show to all and sundry that, be their 
handicraft what it may, there is a pleasure of knowledge and 
a happiness in understanding. He will recognize that while 
education is concerned with making efficient workers and com- 
petent citizens, its highest function is the creation of good and 
happy men. And happiness can exist only in individuals. 
Call the State what you will, organism or mechanism, person 
or fiction, godhead or devil: it remains a collection of indi- 
viduals, and all the philosophy of the world will not make it 
otherwise. The iend being happiness, and happiness being free 
activity, the individuals of the truly great community will 
seek truth and love it as naturally as they seek food and sleep 
and life itself. Truth, in Milton's simile, is ever born a bastard 
into this world, hated and despised. There are many still to 
revile her, many to crush her, but among the legions of the 
oppressed there are some, it seems, who, outcasts themselves, 
have made friends of this outcast and found her company 
enchanting. They sought her for no gain, nay, even lost by 
the search. But they were faithful, and perhaps they will 
soon have many followers ; and small wonder when men learn 
that she, who once seemed most drab and most severe of 
maidens, is in reality most radiant and kindly. 



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